Page 166 - Rainbow County and Other Stories

154 Jack Fritscher

“That a fact,” Lloyd said. He passed a perplexed look up
through his thick glasses. Should he make his move? Was this guy
wanting it, or was he all talk and no action? Were the magazines,
dragged out to arouse him, missing their mark?
“But not everyone will understand it.” Robert slowly turned
the pages of the last magazine.
“Maybe you shouldn’t bother trying to understand what you
do. Just do it,” Lloyd insinuated.
Robert looked up straight into Lloyd’s eyes through his thick
glasses. “I have a gun,” he announced. “A .22 caliber handgun.”
“You don’t say.” Lloyd backed off.
“Does that make you scared of me?”
“Do you have it on you?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t scare me. Your gun scares me. I don’t like
guns.”
“Sometimes you have to scare people. Terror’s the only thing
they respect. If you scare them, you get their undivided attention.”
“Whyn’t you finish up,” Lloyd was changing the subject,
“reading that magazine.”
“Sure,” Robert said. “So far I like it fine. It’s your best one
yet.”
Lloyd took a last few snips here and there around Robert’s
ears, then tried to gentle him down, and sidle on in, seductively
rubbing Robert’s neck with an electric massager. He was surprised
to find very little tension in Robert’s neck and shoulders. “You’re
a cool customer,” he said, “as cool as a cucumber.”
Suddenly, Robert sat bolt upright in Lloyd’s barber chair.
He held it in his hands: a black-and-white photo graph on an
unnumbered magazine page. It was the picture he had spent his
life looking for: magazines in one hand, razor blade in the other.
The photo was of a man seated alone. On either side of the photo
were separate single shots of athletic women. The one on the left
held a golf club. She was set to putt and her breasts hung down
between her stiffened arms. The naked woman on the right held a
jaunty tennis racquet. But it was the naked athlete in the middle
photo who mesmer ized him as much as if he’d found a snapshot

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